Ashton Kemerling

Learn What You Don't Like

Dec 10th, 2012

There’s really nothing worse than someone who has lived their life surrounded by people who agree with them fully. People who live this way have confidence that precedes their knowledge, and will treat contradictory knowledge as an attack on their in-group and world view.

While the above mentioned effect is generally most common in religion and politics, it crops up sometimes in engineering in the so called “holy wars”. Linux vs. Mac vs. Windows, Emacs vs. Vim, etc. The more similar the items in question, the more intense the debate.

This is why I think it’s pretty important to try out technologies that you’d formally written off, and re-evaluate your decisions. I’ve been an Emacs user for about 5 years now, and I’d written off learning Vim for anything other than emergency config-editing on a remote server. But at the behest of my colleagues, I tried Vim for a few weeks recently, and I’ve come to a surprising conclusion: I don’t like Vim. But rather than disliking Vim because I’d already invested in Emacs, I’ve learned exactly what I need first and foremost in an editor, and an understanding of the compromises I’m making in order to use Emacs. Basically it toned me down from being a mild Emacs zealot to an Emacs user.

What exactly made me go back? First and foremost, I strongly prefer the way that Emacs uses buffers. The fact that I don’t have to worry about closing a buffer closing Emacs, and the fact that I can purposefully leave buffers unsaved is nice. I also like having multiple shells open to run various programs needed for development purposes, and I found the Vim solution, ConqueTerm, to be insufficient for my needs.

What do I miss from Vim though? While I’m not sold on modality (it’s another thing to track), Vim’s key combinations are truly superior to Emacs’ offering, especially when it comes to repeating and chaining actions. Also, while Vim’s shells are less intuitive than Emacs’, they tend to survive heavy program output better (30+ megs of terminal output to the shell tends to overload Emacs’ poor head). But the most important thing is that I learned what I value most in an editor, so I will know in the future whether or not a new editor will be right for me.

Now that I look back, I see similar Emacs vs. Vim moments in the past few years. One of the more recent moments was retrying Python, which I had written off in my early college years due to a bad experience. In retrying Python, I discovered that it had a few things that I valued highly in a language, and ended up leaving Ruby for it. And I’d never have made the switch if I hadn’t tried out something I didn’t like.